Abstract
|
The increasing use of productivity and imp … The increasing use of productivity and impact metrics for evaluation
and comparison, not only of individual researchers but also of institutions,
universities and even countries, has prompted the development of bibliometrics.
Currently, metrics are becoming widely accepted as an easy and
balanced way to assist the peer review and evaluation of scientists and/or
research units, provided they have adequate precision and recall.
This paper presents a benchmarking study of a selected list of representative
Portuguese research units, based on a fairly complete set of
parameters: bibliometric parameters, number of competitive projects and
number of PhDs produced. The study aimed at collecting productivity
and impact data from the selected research units in comparable conditions
i.e., using objective metrics based on public information, retrievable online
and/or from official sources and thus verifiable and repeatable. The
study has thus focused on the activity of the 2003-2006 period, where such
data was available from the latest official evaluation.
The main advantage of our study was the application of automatic
tools, achieving relevant results at a reduced cost. Moreover, the results
over the selected units suggest that this kind of analyses will be very useful
to benchmark scientific productivity and impact, and assist peer review. tivity and impact, and assist peer review.
|